I just recently (yesterday) found out that Columbia University is offering a Data Science course. Dr. Rachel Schutt of the Department of Statistics is teaching the course. She is also blogging some of the course material. Sorry, I could not find any video lectures. However, Cathy O’Neil is sitting in on the course and will be blogging some of the material. You can see more at Cathy’s popular blog titled mathbabe.

Recently, the family and I visited a LEGO store. We were given a pamphlet that contained some interesting numbers.

More than 4,000,000 million people will play with LEGO bricks this year

There are an average of 62 LEGO bricks per person on Earth

5,000,000,000 (yeah thats 5 billion) hours per year are spent playing with LEGO bricks

It would take 40,000,000,000 stacked LEGO bricks to reach the moon

19,000,000,000 LEGO elements are made each year – that is 36,000 per minute

Now, I would not really call this big data because it is LEGO bricks not data. Here is what LEGO is missing. The ability to track how the LEGO pieces are used. Imagine if all the LEGO bricks had tiny sensors that would let LEGO know when and how 2 bricks were connected. That would be big data. It would be fun to know what pieces are most commonly connected and which ones are never connected. It would also be fun to know how the bricks are connected. Are they commonly stacked straight or staggered? Privacy issues aside, that would be some seriously fun big data!